Microsoft Office Concerns, from a ​student'​;s perspective.

Office Rant:

 

I’ve been having much frustration with Microsoft Office lately. Charles says feedback is taken seriously here, so hopefully within half a decade, my concerns will be met.

 

I am in the lab class from hell this quarter. Naturally, a lot of time is spent in Excel and Word. In Excel, I would be compiling multiple graphs, having more than one window open at a time with Aero Snap. It was great, I was trucking along. Then, randomly, Excel decided that it would only open up one window, and decide to switch files within that same window (I really hope that is clear). That shouldn’t happen, it hinders productivity by quite a bit. I had about 50 graphs to make, and if you have ever made many properly formatted graphs, that takes quite a while, countless hours.

 

I decided to Bing and Google this issue. I am not the only one troubled by this.

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=excel+open+more+than+one+window&aq=f&aqi=&oq=

http://www.bing.com/search?q=excel+open+more+than+one+window&go=&form=QBLH&qs=n&sc=1-10

 

There is no definitive solution. What I ended up doing is creating a batch file and setting that as the file association for Excel documents.

 

start "Excel" "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE" /e %1

 

Why would Excel work perfectly fine then just revert to this limited functionality? This has happened to me with Office 2007 and Office 2010 Beta. Other than the icons for my Excel documents looking really lame, and the fact that I cannot open Excel documents from the file menu without running into the issue again, the fix seems to work. This is by no means acceptable.

 

I write a lot of technical reports. These all include tons of equations which need to be numbered. I'm dismayed that Word does not include an equation numbering feature. I figured that it did and I just didn't know how to do it, but after some searching I found this blog post.

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archive/2006/10/20/equation-numbering.aspx

 

Even this msdn blog says it's one of Word's most requested features - so why isn't it in there? It would be much easier than the complicated method described in the blog. Currently, I have to use MathType and can do insert right-numbered equation from there, but I would much prefer a Word option. I know from talking to my professors that they would love this option as well.

 

Another issue, which is more of an annoyance than a real issue is printing slides from Powerpoint. I currently have to save my Powerpoints as PDF (which is a nice feature) and then print the PDF. When printing multiple PowerPoint slides per sheet, there is a rather large white space left between each slide. Printing using PDF reader, that white space is essentially gone. I have watched many students become frustrated with tiny slides.

 

Here are some scan examples that I have prepared.

 

Powerpoint 

 

 

PDF

 

 

Powerpoint

 

 

PDF

 

 

 

I do not mean to be overly critical, I do appreciate the effort that has gone into Office 2007 and Office 2010. These issues wear me thin though, I should not need to find a workaround. I plea to Microsoft to address these concerns. 

Excel actually never has opened more than one window unless you open more than one instance of Excel (it's an old-style single window MDI application).  Powerpoint does the same thing (except that it doesn't get the caption buttons in the toolbar).  Surprised it's not fixed in Office 2010, though.

CannotResolveSymbol said:

Excel actually never has opened more than one window unless you open more than one instance of Excel (it's an old-style single window MDI application).  Powerpoint does the same thing (except that it doesn't get the caption buttons in the toolbar).  Surprised it's not fixed in Office 2010, though.

So was me having two instances open a glitch? All I did was double click one file, then double click another, nothing special. If so, it was a damn good glitch, I want it back. For a couple of weeks it worked as I thought it should, each window separate. Aero Snap was really shining at that point. 

intelman said:

CannotResolveSymbol said:

*snip*

So was me having two instances open a glitch? All I did was double click one file, then double click another, nothing special. If so, it was a damn good glitch, I want it back. For a couple of weeks it worked as I thought it should, each window separate. Aero Snap was really shining at that point. 

This has happens to me if I try to open two workbooks with the same file name.  I've just learned not to try to do that.  I also wrote an add-in to save the file with a new guid name, this stops that dead in it's tracks.

 

If at first you don't succeed, put a black border on the master slide and try, try again.

 

-Josh

Excel's behaviour is plain annoying, all the other office apps moved to SDI a long time ago but for some reason the Excel team came up with a hideously hacky version instead. Even selecting the "Show all windows in Taskbar" doesn't give a particularly good experience, though it's marginally better than the default behaviour.

I didn't read fully, but, FYI, workbooks can share computation envirnment. For example, when I open my Excel with my macros and open another excel file. I can run my macro on this other excel file without porting my program over.

 

However, if you don't want this, you can open another clean Excel program, and then, open the excel from the Files->Open path (no double click on Excel file in Windows Explores).

 

AndyC said:

Excel's behaviour is plain annoying, all the other office apps moved to SDI a long time ago but for some reason the Excel team came up with a hideously hacky version instead. Even selecting the "Show all windows in Taskbar" doesn't give a particularly good experience, though it's marginally better than the default behaviour.

Word, Publisher, and InfoPath are actually the only three true SDI apps in Office (2007; I'm not running the 2010 beta)...  Excel is MDI (with the traditional Windows MDI controls in its tab bar if a subwindow is maximized) and Powerpoint is an MDI app faking that it's an SDI app (it doesn't show MDI controls in the tab bar like Excel, but only one window exists at a time and you can un-maximize the MDI windows inside it with controls on the "View" tab).  Access can't open more than one document, OneNote is tab-based (MDI), and Outlook is different (emails get their own windows, but the main UI isn't document-based at all).

 

Why all the other Office apps don't behave like Word, I don't know.  It's not like a single process can't open more than one window (Word only runs a single process no matter how many windows you have open).

CannotResolveSymbol said:

AndyC said:

*snip*

Word, Publisher, and InfoPath are actually the only three true SDI apps in Office (2007; I'm not running the 2010 beta)...  Excel is MDI (with the traditional Windows MDI controls in its tab bar if a subwindow is maximized) and Powerpoint is an MDI app faking that it's an SDI app (it doesn't show MDI controls in the tab bar like Excel, but only one window exists at a time and you can un-maximize the MDI windows inside it with controls on the "View" tab).  Access can't open more than one document, OneNote is tab-based (MDI), and Outlook is different (emails get their own windows, but the main UI isn't document-based at all).

 

Why all the other Office apps don't behave like Word, I don't know.  It's not like a single process can't open more than one window (Word only runs a single process no matter how many windows you have open).

PowerPoint 2010 is a proper "New SDI" application - it no longer fakes it like Excel does.

These changes from "MDI" to "New SDI" have been slowly making their way through the Office applications since Office 2000.

 

Simon Jones

Is there a reason the transition would take so long? Maybe myself and the others who wanted to have two excel sheets next to eachother are in a minority? In anycase, I see no reason why the behavior is how it is.

intelman said:

Is there a reason the transition would take so long? Maybe myself and the others who wanted to have two excel sheets next to eachother are in a minority? In anycase, I see no reason why the behavior is how it is.

Add me to the list of people that find MDI in Excel a constant irritation.